Chinese Year of the Goat: Inclement by Allison Titus

To celebrate the Chinese New Year and 2015 as The Year of the Goat, I went in search of something suitably goatish to amaze and inspire, and discovered this lovely poem by Allison Titus.

Inclement

BY ALLISON TITUS

Snow and after, each bidding
and restlessness turns the goat’s heart
fallow: long hours of ice and bluster:
asymmetry of wind.
Say every goat has in its heart
a field, and each field, a goat:
the slumber of muscle and grass
is still a different elegy. Every
heart writes a different letter
of winter to its cold.
Icicles on sheet
metal, bucket frozen in the well.
.
Once there was no language
for the weather, just          The sky is low and birdless;
or The sky is a box of wings.
.
Illustration: ‘Spring’ – Pablo Picasso (via WikiArt)
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